Pane in the Glass

Everyday journal of Fiona Glass

The tv's awash with adverts for Christmas now, all glitter and glitz and dreadful old songs that have been forgotten for a very good reason. Honestly, if I hear 'Winter Wonderland' or 'It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas' one more time I think I shall go out and strangle the nearest reindeer. Bah humbug. And there's another *three weeks* of it to get through.

I have made a start on my Christmas shopping, though, rather to my amazement. With a brace of family birthdays in late November I usually have a mad flap in the last two or three weeks, trying to buy presents for everyone when the shelves are already getting bare. But last year I forced myself to be more organised, and it was so much less stressy that I'm determined to do the same again. So far I have the whole of one cousin's present, half the other cousin's present, and something with penguins for our penguin-mad friends. Not much, but it's a start.

We spent the weekend huddled over a coal fire (and unlike the misers in the old joke, we even lit it). It's been really cold again, with thick freezing fog on Saturday, frosts most nights, and snow flurries this morning. Brrr. The last couple of afternoons I've given up and stuck the heating on early. I can't work if I can't type, and I've never yet found a way to type when my fingers are numb. My father in law said in the autumn that he thought it was going to be a 'proper' winter this year, and it's beginning to look as though he was right.

Mind you, the current ads are better than that awful 'I'm NORMAL' campaign from a few years back, when they were busy trying to convince the buying public that it was fine to be a size bigger because they, M&S, were making all their clothes a size *smaller* to save money... O.o